The Encounter Circus

The following project by Lys Villalba Rubio—then a student at ETSAM’s Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos in Madrid—is pitched as a way of using architecture as “an active element” in the “regeneration of degraded places.”

[Image: From a project by Lys Villalba Rubio].

Based on my own non-existent Spanish (and the help of Babelfish), it seems that the project specifically proposes a “hospital of cities.” Villalba Rubio suggests that this is a new building type; acting like a social enzyme, it “activates in each place an urban regenerative process,” allowing spatial healing to begin.

There is also a “toolbox” and an “encounter circus,” the latter of which encourages “citizen participation in the regenerative process: a place in which all contribute, from the expert to the anonymous citizen.”

[Image: From a project by Lys Villalba Rubio].

Those three programs—toolbox, hospital of cities, and encounter circus—would be constructed atop a foundation system that is so easy to assemble and disassemble that it would leave no architectonic trace of its existence, Villalba Rubio writes.

Like an instant, inhabitable roller-coaster of pedestrian paths and new tent-like social spaces, complete with wind turbines and routes of mechanical transport, all coiling above formerly dead zones of the city, Villalba Rubio’s installation would being a strange flash of activity back into the urban skies—before disappearing altogether, leaving no traces, the architect claims, but in memory.

3 thoughts on “The Encounter Circus”

I think the way the project is presented in is very styled. Conceptually it reminds me of Constants 'new babylon' and archigrams 'walking cities' I wonder which contemporary notion led to this idea in our times.The combination of this styling with an idea of cities that leave no trace does not make a lot of sense to me.